Global computer networks such as the Internet have allowed electronic commerce (“e-commerce”) to flourish to a point where a large number of customers purchase goods and services over websites operated by online merchants. Because the Internet provides an effective medium to reach this large customer base, online merchants who are new to the e-commerce marketplace are often flooded with high customer traffic from the moment their websites are rolled out. In order to effectively serve customers, online merchants are charged with the same responsibility as conventional merchants: they must provide quality service to customers in a timely manner. Often, insufficient computing resources are the cause of a processing bottleneck that results in customer frustration and loss of sales. This phenomena has resulted in the need for a new utility: leasable on-demand computing infrastructure. Previous attempts at providing computing resources have entailed leasing large blocks of storage and processing power. However, for a new online merchant having no baseline from which to judge customer traffic upon rollout, this approach is inefficient. Either too much computing resources are leased, depriving a start up merchant of financial resources that are needed elsewhere in the operation, or not enough resources are leased, and a bottleneck occurs.
To make an on-demand computer infrastructure possible, computer applications must be ported across computer networks to different processing locations. However, this approach is costly in terms of overhead for the applications to be moved across the network must be saved, shut down, stored, ported and then restored and re-initialized with the previously running data. The overhead is prohibitive and negates any performance improvements realized by transferring the application to another computer. Thus, there remains a heartfelt need for a system and method for effecting a transfer of applications across computer networks without incurring costly processing overhead.